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41
PUTNEY AND ROEHAMPTON.
In the absence of any really available and universal
record of sickness in strictly private medical practice, it is
of course impossible to measure the exact amount of disease
that has occurred within a given period in any locality,
but there can be no doubt the intensity of such maladies
as may have prevailed in any particular year can be determined
with tolerable accuracy by considering them in
connexion with their fatality. If this be done with due
regard to the age, sex, and social position of every person
dying within the Sub-district, the annual record will become
all the more valuable as a means of determining many a
question of sanitary and social policy that might otherwise
escape consideration.
The accompanying table of mortality, the form being
the same as that employed in these reports for a number
of years past, is so arranged as to afford all the requisite
details of every death that has been registered within the
parish in the 52 weeks comprising the year 1866.
Another important feature of this form of table is the
facility it affords for comparing the statistics of one period
with those of another, and for determining also the correct
averages for any given series of years.
The table in other respects is valuable, particularly in
furnishing reliable data upon which to calculate periodically
the local mortuary rates, as well as each year to assist in
ascertaining the proportion which the deaths bear to population,
and the ratio of the mortality from Zymotic diseases
to that from all causes.